Abdellatif Kechiche
Cous cous

"La Graine et le mulet" by Abdellatif Kechiche (this is its original title) is a beautiful and intense film that revolves around the events of the family of 61-year-old Sliman Beji. It is the story of a family's attempt at redemption in a foreign country, it doesn't really matter where they come from or where they are now, except in the colors of their rooms or the scents of their kitchens.
Marseille is indeed just the backdrop to this story of North Africans, Russians, and Italians living in France like one big family, including contrasts and contradictions.
It is a film of smiles, silences, cries, screams, and laden tables. The camera rarely shows us the characters fully, almost as if to steal the emotions of this (not any) family. It's no coincidence that the director's gaze becomes colder and more distant precisely when the characters step out of the familiar maternal belly made of domineering and resourceful women and hardworking men (even if not always).
The universality of the story lies in the hope in the characters' eyes or their long faces when they face disappointments. It's not wrong to venture that this is a sort of neorealist film, not coincidentally, the protagonist (Habib Boufares) is not a professional actor.

The story, as I was saying, deals with the (of cyclopean dimensions, to be honest) family of Slimane, a 61-year-old man separated with children from a first marriage, now living with a divorced woman with a daughter. Slimane is fired and decides to open an ethnic restaurant to try to provide a future and social redemption for his offspring. It will be the family to help him, and it will be the family to oppose him in this project, thus showing old and new wounds flowing through the small rooms and rented chambers.
His ex-wife will take care of the kitchen, preparing couscous like no one else can. Slimane himself and his children will work on recovering an old ship (where the restaurant will be opened), obtaining permits and money, and since their lives revolve entirely around the port of this small town near Marseille, it will not be difficult to prepare excellent couscous with fresh fish. Friends will play on the evening of the restaurant's presentation to the authorities.
The thinness of the plot actually hides a web of passionate and engaging family affairs. Amidst unfaithful husbands and social, thus existential, precarity. It will be the belly dance of the stepdaughter from the second relationship, Olfa (and barely tolerated by the children from the first wife), to bring a partial and momentary relief.
A necessary, strong, sensual, and sunny film is this Couscous, made of women who are not beautiful and therefore are very beautiful; after all, if couscous is not spicy, it has no taste.
The important thing is not to consider this film ethnic just because it's set among immigrants; Kechiche himself tells us, talking about the triumphant reception he and his film received: "Not as long as they define me as an Arab-French director. I would like to be just a director".